


pushed

by constellatory



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Drowning, some mild suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 17:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9196100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellatory/pseuds/constellatory
Summary: He's never been one to fail to seize an opportunity.





	

What the hell was he doing out here?

Adachi watched him mess around on the dock, despite the fact that he was getting soaking wet in this torrential downpour. It was weirdly entertaining. Was he looking for one of those damn cats Dojima was always complaining about at the station? Knowing him, probably. Yu would care about a bug if it just asked him for a favor.

It’d be so ... easy, he thought. The Samegawa was practically flooded with all this rain, so it was moving way faster than normal. Anybody who fell in would have a tough time getting back out again. They might even drown. And in rain this heavy, Yu hadn’t even noticed he was standing there a couple feet away.

Wouldn’t that be nice? To have this kid and his idiot brigade of friends off his back. They were so damn annoying. Watching them flail around trying to rescue everybody that idiot Namatame “saved” was one thing, but having them prying into his business was another. And the more time that went on, the more he kind of started to get concerned about how close they were getting.

Not, like, _really_ close. They were a bunch of kids. What did they know? But it was irritating, like having to swat away flies all the time in the summer.

Wouldn’t it throw them off if their golden boy wasn’t there to give them orders.

Wouldn’t it be easy. So simple.

Just one quick little push.

 

* * *

 

He fully expected Yu to just magically turn up the next day, maybe sporting a head cold but otherwise no worse for wear. That would be so like the kid, miraculously getting out of some scrape nobody else in their right minds would survive. Besides, he’d done it kind of on a whim, you know? It kind of felt more like just a mean prank than anything. A dumb thing friends might do to each other, even. Not that— they were _friends,_ that was ridiculous thinking such an uptight kid with delusions of being some kinda hero could be _his_ friend.

But it was like that. You know. Just something stupid and impulsive.

The next day there was nothing. Or rather, there was a lot of something, and nothing of what he expected.

No Yu.

Just Dojima looking tired and agitated, and those kids Yu was always running around with in their usual gaggle at Junes, except minus their leader. They looked tense. He didn’t even realize how long he’d kinda been idly staring at them until two of them — the kid with the dumb hair and the mannish chick, whatsherface, Amagi’s friend — spotted him and ran over.

Dammit. He should’ve moved on when he had the chance.

“Adachi-san!” This was the boy, the awkward one that got arrested a few months back. Adachi affected surprise, propping a hand on his hip and using his other hand to rub the back of his neck.

“Hey, uhhh, what’s up? You guys look a little upset. Something bothering you?”

“Uhhm...” The girl — what the hell was her name. Satonaka? — squeezed an eye shut and looked uncertain. Adachi tried to summon the will to give a shit. Shame that Amagi hadn’t been the one to come over. At least she was something to look at.

“We were just wondering if you heard... is everything alright? Um, at home, with Dojima-san. Yu-kun never came to school today and we haven’t heard anything...”

“He’s not picking up his phone,” said the boy, pitching his voice low like he might sound more grown up that way. He looked all serious, too.

“Seriously? Wow, that’s not like him... look, I can ask Dojima-san, but that’s about all I can promise, alright? You kids shouldn’t be worrying about stuff like this. I’m sure everything’s fine. Every kid’s gotta have their teenage rebellion, right? He’s probably off just—”

“Yu’s not like that!” the boy burst out, gesturing angrily and drawing the stares of the rest of his little friend’s group. “He wouldn’t just—“

“Yosuke!” Satonaka was hissing, flashing looks between her obnoxiously loud friend and Adachi like she had something to worry about. “Leave it alone! Sorry, Adachi-san. Just... let us know what you find out, okay?”

Without waiting for a response she dragged the boy away, and they all got back to huddling.

Adachi set off without waiting to see what their reaction was, wanting to look like he was on the case. It’d get them off his back, at least. If he looked busy, maybe he could keep the rest of these hicks from bothering him, too.

Whatever. It wasn’t really his problem. Yu was probably home sleeping off the cold he picked up from falling into the river like a dumbass. Let his friends worry. Wouldn’t they all just be so excited when their perfect little leader woke up from his nap and got back to all of them, texting cute reassurances or whatever the hell he probably did. Adachi didn’t know. Adachi didn’t text him.

Not like he needed or wanted to, right?

The next day Dojima opened a missing persons file on his nephew.

A week later, someone reported a body washed up on the banks of the Samegawa. It turned up a little ways out of town, down the river, so it took a while before anyone noticed it there. Given the delay and all the water, the body was already kind of a mess by the time they got to it. The hair and the Yasogami uniform were unmistakable, though.

Adachi had never seen Dojima so fucked up. Course, he hadn’t been around for the wife’s death, what was her name, Misato or something?, but he imagined this was probably something close. Raging and incoherent one minute, crying brokenly the next. He’d had to take time off work, something he never did, to arrange a funeral and get Yu’s parents into town. It felt like all of Inaba was in an uproar over this one goddamn kid. His gaggle of intrepid explorers even turned up at the police station, raising hell about wanting answers. A few of them were crying. Adachi didn’t care to notice which. He hated being saddled with babysitting them, since Dojima was out and the other guys were busy processing the case. He always got stuck with the shitty grunt work.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he sighed for the tenth time. “We’re still figuring out what happened to him, other than he drowned—”

“Maybe if you did your _job_ —”

“How could it take a week? A _week?!”_

“I’ll be sure to assist the police with this case.” That was Naoto-kun, the department’s little helper. Or ... it should’ve been Naoto-chan now, right? Haha, who cared. But the look she was giving him was real serious. The way she looked whenever the department overrode her requests or didn’t listen to her, which was pretty frequently. Adachi had to bite down a smirk. Scary, this little pint-sized detective and her now leaderless gang. What could they do without Yu, anyway? They’d be useless. There were already little better than useless with that guy around getting his nose in everyone’s business.

“Of course we’ll be happy to have your help, Naoto-kun! We’re just a little under pressure right now, so if you guys could come back later—”

“There is no later! Yu-kun... he doesn’t... he won’t get to _have_ a later!”

“Chie—”

“You have to find out who did this!” Adachi didn’t have to affect his look of concern, this time. At least, not as much. It was easy to feel concerned about Risette. She was so damn cute.

“Hey, we’re gonna do our best. He was Dojima-san’s nephew, you know? We all cared about him.”

_Little shit._

It took some time, but eventually he got them back out the door. Crap, he had a headache from dealing with their squalling. Why were all kids so goddamn obnoxious?

Later that night, Adachi pulled out his cellphone. There was a contact in it. He knew the contact’s history had a couple calls in it, going back and forth. He’d received texts from it, but never answered.

Well, he wouldn’t need to worry about that now. He decided to delete it off his phone.

Dojima brought him over a few days later. Said he needed help boxing up Yu’s stuff, but wouldn’t say why. Adachi suspected he just didn’t want to look at most of it. Memories, probably? He couldn’t relate.

The way Nanako looked up at them when the door opened was indescribable. Adachi felt a cold squeeze in his gut looking at the shine in her eyes. Even he could put it together.

She’d heard two sets of footsteps.

But it was him, and not her valiant big brother. Just him. And she sat down hard on her heels when she saw who it was, directing her gaze back to the table. She didn’t say a word. Dojima didn’t even tell her to say hello.

Even though the house had always been this quiet before, it somehow felt way quieter now.

... what the hell, that was such a stupid thing to think.

They got the room all put away pretty quick. Seems like Yu didn’t have much stuff. He’d always been a weird kid, and this was just proof he was way too strange. Going around making friends out of _everyone_ he seemed to run into, no matter how annoying, and still finding time to build models like some sheltered little kid. Adachi found a smile on his lips as he turned one over in his hands, and decided not to examine why as he wiped his expression clean again and dropped the thing in a box.

There was a little service at the Dojima house. It was probably a bad idea. It wasn't a big place, and it seemed like most of the town turned out for some kid who’d been there less than a freaking year, you know? Tons and tons of students, plus his little team, pretty much all of them crying, and even a couple others Adachi was surprised to see, all trying to crowd in and take turns paying their respects. Some hot nurse from the hospital. Shit, did the kid really have that much game? Unbelievable. Teachers from the school, a random woman and her son ... he even thought he spotted a fox lurking around outside, but that was just crazy.

“I got something for you,” Dojima told him towards the end of the night, looking paler and more tired than Adachi had ever seen him. Somewhat despite himself, he asked what.

“I’ll get it to you later. Got a little more cleaning to do... you know, around the house. Soon, though.”

Soon ended up getting delayed. Past Nanako-chan’s kidnapping, past Dojima’s accident, past Namatame getting himself caught, past the Scooby Doo gang having the nerve to confront him in the hospital. Well, it didn’t really matter, anyway. He hadn’t cared. Knowing Dojima, it would’ve been a cabbage or something, some shit he thought was useful but was really just more garbage.

He really hadn’t expected these kids to persist with Yu gone. If anything, they were irritatingly fired up. No matter what he tried to do to distract them or throw them off, cutting off paths and taunting them with misdirections and throwing Shadow after Shadow at them, they just kept coming. And even then, he hadn’t expected them to _beat_ him.

To think, all along, he’d really been this pathetic. What a joke.

Without Ameno-Sagiri, without his Persona (so like Yu's, they'd told him, spitting words at his face like he'd give a single shit), without any will left in him to stand, he was hoping they’d all finally make good on the murder in their eyes. It’d be nice, not to have to put up with this crap anymore.

As usual, what he expected wasn’t what he got. What he got instead was one of them asking him why.

Why?

“Yeah, you heard us. He wasn’t even like the other murders! You just... you just—“

“Drowned him. Don’t be afraid to say it. He knows what he did.”

“It was just ... easy,” he murmured, staring up at the broken sky before shutting his eyes.

“ _Easy?”_ Hanamura barked, his voice breaking. Sounded like he was going to cry. Again. How many times had he heard this kid cry by now? Needy little snot. “Killing my _best friend_ was _easy?_ I bet it was, you worthless—”

“Yosuke, no! Don't!”

“Leave it alone, man.”

“Leave it alone? _Leave it alone?!_ Why does he deserve to live when Yu doesn’t?! Tell me that, dammit! Tell me _why!”_

“Yosuke-senpai, stop! This isn’t... this isn’t what he’d want. He’d want us to bring Adachi back.”

“What he wants doesn’t matter! _He’s dead!”_

Adachi didn’t open his eyes, but things were pretty quiet after that. Seemed like Hanamura struck some kind of nerve.

Helplessly, tired all the way down to his bones, Adachi started to laugh. He kept on laughing when the group turned on him, started demanding to know what was so funny.

“You’re all... a bunch of idiots.” He pulled out his phone, which didn’t work in here, but he could access his contacts. Still could scroll down to the entry marked _Narukami Yu_.

“He was ... my friend, you know? Heh. You think I’m the creep? How about some high schooler who just invites a fully grown man over for dinner with no context or reason? Doesn’t that seem kind of shady to you? Makes it seem kinda like he might’ve wanted something _else._ Was he just lonely? Seriously, what the hell was his problem? Why did he try so damn hard?”

“Because he cared,” one of them insisted.

“Sure he did. You know how much his smile pissed me off? Always with the goody-goody act… ahhh, who gives a shit. Why are we even talking about this? Hey, kid.” Adachi sat up, leaning one arm over his knee and staring right at Hanamura. “You want your friend back? Well, too bad. He’s dead, and you’re never seeing him again. You wanna kill me? Fine. Go ahead. It won’t change anything, though. Life sucks, huh?”

Hanamura was struggling to reach him, held back by the tall kid, the troublemaker in the gang. He'd started actually crying, too. More like outright sobbing, so hard he couldn’t talk anymore, and eventually he stopped fighting. Some of the girls crowded around him, leaving Adachi staring up at Naoto and the blond one.

“Stand up, Adachi-san. We’re taking you home.”

“Why,” he breathed, without hope.

“Cuz it’s what Yu-senpai would’ve wanted us to do, dammit, so we’re gonna do it.”

Jail was fine. Jail was nice. Sometimes they beat him senseless, but hey, who cared. He had to do the time for the crime, right?

Ugh. Man, those kids had really failed to drive the point home. If Yu had been there for that battle, he probably would’ve said all the—

But he hadn’t been.

Kinda funny, he thought. All the shit that can happen as a result from simply taking advantage of a single opportunity. Just one little push. Go figure it’d end up being such a big deal, right? Ah, well. Whatever.

Dojima visited him, which was a surprise. He had a little box. Just a little white box, no adornments. Still, getting a gift in prison from the guy whose nephew you killed in cold blood is pretty surprising.

“Take this,” Dojima muttered, and Adachi tried to resist his instincts to quail under that stare. He’d been mostly acting when he’d been doing the cowed but behaved detective thing, sure, but damn, that guy could get really intense when he wanted.

“He would’ve wanted you to have it.”

... he?

Adachi found himself staring at a mug. The same red mug Yu had always used to serve him coffee when Adachi was at the house.

If Adachi didn’t know he’d get in trouble for smashing the thing against a wall, he would have. Rather than have it stare at him day after day, reminding him incessantly of the kid’s dumb puns and his smiles and encouraging words and—

And.

Well.

At least now they’d both get to rot.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really sure where this came from. I wrote this in a day, inspired by an AU I have with my bae [manicExpressive](http://archiveofourown.org/users/manicExpressive/pseuds/manicExpressive/works). Just some speculation and what ifs. I've also been itching to write Adachi for a while. I don't think I quite lived up to my own expectations here, so you'll see him again in something of mine. Anyway, as usual, feel free to hit me up on my [tumblr](http://thievishly.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to say hello.


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